Sorry – the electricians arrived and had the power off about 2 minutes after my prior post. So no before pictures. As for after… it looks like a gray metal box on the garage wall, pretty much like every other electrical guts box I’ve ever seen. 
How do I put this – it’s not so much I thought I was overpaying, as that I was surprised at how much it cost. If you get the difference. The thing is, the only other electric work I’ve ever had to hire was to have a, uh, heavy duty? line w/outlet put into a convenient location when we got an electric dryer. (Done by the same guy, btw) so I had no experience to judge by. Now that I’ve had confirmation from two others that they paid similar amounts AND another electrician gave us a ballpark estimate that was in line … I’m okay with the price.
Basically, if the situation was, if we called around we might have found someone who would have done the job for a couple hundred less, well, we can live with giving that up. The convenience of getting the job done fast, and so far as I can tell, right, was worth the difference. We just didn’t want to be paying 100% too much or anything like that.
Vincent (I’m tired of calling him the ‘electrician guy’) said basically the same thing when I’d asked him about the upgrade. Which I think is a good sign that he wasn’t out to take total advantage of us, since he could have said “Sure” and upped the job.
That’s what we got. Which is a small upgrade, apparently what we had was 60 amp. The Electric Company repairman had already told us the meter socket was bad, bad, bad. So bad he said he probably should have cut off power to our house then and there and reported it as a hazardous situation to something or other. That guy didn’t look at the panel in the garage, but given that it was 45 plus years old, I don’t find it hard to believe that it was bad, too.
All the other stuff you listed – all new from the top of the garage, the two ground rods, the jumpering the water meter, all that stuff got done.
So far, I’m pleased with this guy’s work. I called him Monday afternoon, he swung by to look at the job within an hour or two. I called back about 9pm to give the go ahead. He’d offered to rearrange the timing of some smaller jobs to take care of us Tuesday if we wanted, saying they’d get there between 7:45 and 8:a.m.
They arrived at 7:47 – him, his son, and an apprentice. By noon it was all done. (I guess the ‘all day’ he’d said it would take would be for one man working alone.)
So, less than 24 hours from first call to problem to all fixed. And he gave us a definite time slot and kept his word. Very nice that last, when you often have to take time off from work and hang around all day waiting for a serviceman who says he’ll be there ‘sometime Wednesday’ and never makes it at all. :mad:
“Funny” coda. Last night we again had thunderstorms (about the sixth day in a row) and when I heard the first boom is said “Wouldn’t it be ironic if we had a power failure” due to the storm, seeing as we’d been without power for 12 hours on Saturday and most of the day Monday due to this problem.
Two minutes later the power went out. :eek:
And came on. And went out. And back on. In all, the power failed six times between 7:45 and 8:10, but only about 90 seconds of no power in total. Yes, not just us, it was happening in the neighbors, too, and we could hear that nasty hum of the transformers being overloaded.